Archive | July, 2007

at a United States Senator’s home.

CNN.com reports:   Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure Monday, causing him to fall while at his summer home off the coast of Maine, the Supreme Court said.  Chief Justice John Roberts was taken to a hospital in Maine after a fall at his summer home.  Roberts has “fully recovered from the incident,” and a neurological evaluation […]

For more on the resurgence — in the U.S., fortunately still mild — in attempts to punish blasphemy, see this thread here. As I noted below, the Shmulevich prosecution seems to be an unusual sort of hate crime prosecution, in which Shmulevich’s punishment may be enhanced simply because he was motivated by religious hostility. But […]

Imagine five situations: Stanislav Shmulevich steals a Koran from Pace University, puts it in the toilet, and covers it with feces. He is prosecuted not just for the misdemeanor of damaging a book (which he seems to be guilty of), but for a felony hate crime, because he is acting “because of a belief … […]

Stanislav Shmulevich was arrested Friday, apparently for stealing two Korans (in two separate incidents) from a Pace University “meditation room,” throwing them into Pace toilets, and defecating on one of them. I’ll have more on the constitutional and policy questions raised by this arrest in an upcoming post. Here I’d like to just summarize the […]

Like many of you, I suspect, I spent a few hours this weekend at the theaters watching the Simpsons movie. I thought A.O Scott, in his review in the NY Times, got it just about right — it’s not (and not trying to be) some sort of grand Simpsons apotheosis, but rather just a good […]

Last year, I blogged about Captain Copyright, a Canadian site aimed at conveying a pro-copyright message to children, and at being used by schoolteachers for that purpose. I faulted the site for having a “legal notice” that seemed to misrepresent copyright law. Reader Bill Poser, who found the Captain Copyright site through the earlier post, […]

Eugene has been kind enough to invite me to blog a bit about a book I

As I write, it’s still Sunday night in the US, but it’s Monday morning in Asia. Asian stock market trading so far: ^N225 Nikkei 225: DOWN (1.00%) ^SSEC Shanghai Composite: UP (1.95%) ^STI Straits Times: UP (0.21%) ^AORD All Ordinaries, DOWN: (0.43%) ^HSI Hang Seng: DOWN (0.19%) ^JKSE Jakarta Composite: DOWN (0.01%) ^NZ50 NZSE 50: […]

I’m off to Poland for a few days to do a presentation at the IVR World Congress on Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in Cracow. I will be talking about political ignorance, “voting with your feet,” and their implications for democracy on the Special Panel on Libertarianism organized by Japanese legal academic Susumu Morimura. […]

More political turmoil in Japan after Sunday’s Elections (via Reuters/CNN): Hawkish Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to stay in his post despite a crushing defeat for his ruling camp in an upper house election, but policy gridlock loomed and Abe’s grip on his job was still uncertain. Voters outraged at a string of government […]

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a partial settlement in John Lott’s defamation settlement against Steven Levitt. In documents filed today in federal court, the two parties outlined a settlement that requires Mr. Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics: A […]

In reply to my recent post on the shortcomings of Vladimir Putin’s repressive regime in Russia, one commenter suggests that the Russian people are “getting precisely the kind of government they deserve.” This is a very common point of view: that people who live under repressive or corrupt governments are in some sense responsible for […]

What would happen if there was another Supreme Court vacancy before January 2009 and Senate Democrats followed Senator Schumer’s counsel and successfully blocked the confirmation of another Bush nominee? One possibility is that President Bush would make a recess appointment. Such action is hardly unprecedented. According to C-Span, there have been 15 recess appointments to […]

Today’s Washington Post reports that political appointees in the Bush Administration blocked the publication of a 2006 Surgeon General’s report on global health. As the Post reports, in recent Congressional testimony Carmona cited the report’s “suppression as an example of the Bush administration’s frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist.” […]